With the Testimony of the President of Latvia

Series:

Paweł Sekuła

The book presents a record of oral accounts given by liquidators who participated in minimizing the effects of the Chernobyl disaster. The main research goal was to present the circumstances of actions taken in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 1986–1988 from the perspective of direct participants of the events in question. The overall work is complemented with archival, press materials and other documentation never published before, as well as materials from the private archives of the survivors. The book presents the reality of the clean-up operations undertaken in the area of the catastrophe and shows the community of liquidators, their living conditions and everyday life in the Chernobyl Zone, as well as the reality in which Chernobyl veterans lived after returning to their homeland.

Series:

Anja Hennemann

This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.

Book
(EPUB)

Science Fiction Film and the Absurd

Shai Tubali

Over the last two decades, philosophers have been increasingly inclined to consider science fiction films as philosophical exercises that center on the nature of human consciousness and existence. Albert Camus’ philosophy of the absurd, however, has almost never been employed as a constructive perspective that can reveal unexplored aspects of these films. This is surprising, since science fiction films seem to be packed with visions and dialogues that echo the Sisyphean universe.

Cosmos and Camus endeavors to set foot in this uncharted terrain. Its first part introduces the main components of Camus’ absurdity so that it can be easily applied to the analysis of the films later. Equipped with these Camusean essentials, the book delves into an indepth analysis of two first-encounter films (Contact and Arrival) and two A.I. films (A.I. and Her). These analyses yield more than an insightful reflection of the absurd contents in science fiction film. Indeed, imaginative collisions with nonhumans seem to tell us a lot about the nature of the absurd in the human condition, as well as raising the question of whether absurdity is exclusively a human matter. Ultimately, the interpretation of the films illuminates the films themselves just as much as it illuminates, challenges, and expands Camus’ concept of absurdity.